21 April 2015

On January 22nd, Richard Evans wrote in the London Review of Books on two new publications tracing the causation of the Holocaust. I then wrote a reader's letter to the LRB, disagreeing with some aspects of his analysis, which the LRB published on March 5; Evans replied in the paper on March 19. (Scroll down on this link to read both letters.) After reading Evans' reply, my impression was that he had discounted my criticisms rather than answering them, and so I wrote again to the paper; this time they decided not to publish. Here, then, is my critiqe of Evans' position:

"Richard Evans won’t budge in
his refusal to acknowledge glaring internal contradictions in large historical
movements: the Confessing Church on the one hand, and the pre-1919 SPD on the
other (Letters, 19 March). The Nazi state’s proximity to totalitarianism meant
that all the various strands of domestic resistance were more or less bound to
fail. Thinking in terms of the cultural and political legacies of these
different resistances – a synthesizing rather than hierarchizing approach –
could therefore tell us more about history as it was lived than the concept of 'effectiveness' and 'effect(s)' can do. As Evans uses the latter yardstick,
then he should display evidence that Niemöller’s resistance – and by his own
implication, that of the Confessing Church as a whole – had 'effect', while the
White Rose 'was wholly without'. The significance of Niemöller preaching to
thousands in Dahlem is undeniable, but this is no evidence of effectiveness in
itself. And how can Evans prioritize this above the White Rose succeeding in
disseminating pamphlets in increasing numbers through 1942-43, with the
penultimate and final essays each reaching an estimated 8000 readers in early 1943. Smuggled out to the UK and reprinted in the original German, millions of
copies of the final pamphlet were then air-dropped over Germany in July 1943
under the title, 'Manifest der Münchner Studenten' – the Munich Students'
Manifesto. (For details of the statistics, please see the Psychological Warfare Archive.)

Evans’ avowal of the ‘biblical fundamentalist’ character of the Confessing
Church conflates what leaders and members wrote and said about the church in
public, above all in the 1934 Barmer declaration, with the much more diverse
views members expressed in private, evidenced for example in personal letters.
By this logic, all Church of England attendees today should be called ‘early
church fundamentalists’, because of the regular recitation of the Nicene creed
at Anglican services. If Evans wants to stick to the fundamentalist
pigeon-hole, he’d do well to elucidate how Niemöller’s choice of fundamentals
paralysed his resistance. Fixated on the Lutheran cannon, and above all
on Romans 13:1-7, Niemöller and other Confessing Church pastors propagated a path
of theological disobedience combined with political loyalty to the Nazi state.
When their colleague Friedrich Weißler was suspected of leaking a critical position paper – which the Confessing Church had already submitted to the Nazi leadership – to a Swiss newspaper in 1936, Niemöller and others moved quickly to officially
distance themselves from him, leaving the stage free for Weißler’s arrest and
subsequent murder soon after in prison. (See Heymel's introduction to Niemöller, Dahlemer Predigten: Kritische Ausgabe. Berlin, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2011.) White Rose members drew entirely
different conclusions from the Bible. Hans Scholl, co-author of all six
pamphlets, had understood the necessity of an armed struggle by Christmas 1942,
and focussed on texts such as Luke, Ch. 22: 35-37, to provide the scriptural
justification for that. The attention given to the White Rose by anti-fascist
and anti-authoritarian movements inside Germany since 1945 has been massive. (See in this respect the intensity of activities connected to the White Rose today, as communicated by the White Rose Foundation.)

Evans disregard for the body
of recent scholarship about anti-Semitism inside the SPD directed at Rosa
Luxemburg and other party members of Jewish origin is even more bewildering.
Ignoring writing on exactly this racism by, among others, Jacqueline Rose,Lars Fischer,Robert Wistrich and Rory Castle, Evans concentrates instead on
working-class socialists identifying positively with Jewish Social Democrat
leaders. This tendency did not preclude Wolfgang Heine telling delegates at the
1901 Social Democratic Congress that east European Jewish immigrants –
Luxemburg grew up in Poland – were behaving like guests who 'come to us and
spit in our parlour.' Nor did it stop Gutsav Noske wielding the anti-Semitic
cliché of a secret, power-hungry clique, to accuse Luxemburg and other east
European Jews of corrupting Marxism, making it 'incomprehensible to the German
workers', in his memoirs published in 1947. This is the same Noske, who, in his
governmental capacity as People’s Deputy for Military and Navy, was phoned by Waldemar
Papst, Luxemburg’s captor, on the evening of Luxemburg’s murder in January
1919, Papst asking what to do with Luxemburg. Noske assented to the killing –
according to Papst. He certainly knew about the murder plans, and did nothing
whatsoever to hinder them.

With the ferocity of these
anti-Jewish currents, Evans insistence that Luxemburg 'was never once
criticised because she was Jewish', remains a puzzle. To her face: rarely.
Behind her back: consistently, over decades. As a member of the translator team
on the first Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, I hope our work can draw more
and more non-historians into this territory. Armed with a first-class scholarly
work, let’s see how many of them will trespass into debates about German and world
history."